Starfist: Hangfire (36 page)

Open communication between villages or, far worse, with the infidels of Interstellar City, was deliberately made so difficult as to be nearly impossible. Hetman Mohammet had to wait a moment before the radio was ready to transmit. Then he had to fiddle with the dials to bring the district radioman's voice in clearly enough that he could understand the man's responses to what he said. Finally, his communication complete, he turned the radio off and went outside to where his donkey waited. He mounted the beast, kicked and geed it into motion, and began the briskly clopping journey to his hiding place some three kilometers to the northwest. But it had taken too long to establish communications with the district capital, and the makers of the distant thunder traveled very fast.

Hetman Mohammet hadn't even reached the last house in the village when the first infidel fighting machine roared in and began blasting the houses to cinders. He cried out a prayer and heeled his donkey.

The frightened beast didn't need the urging, it had broken into a gallop even before Mohammet's heels touched its flanks. They ran into another fighting machine that was entering from the northwest, its snout already firing at the first house it encountered.

When the mullahs said the infidels came from a demon world, Hetman Mohammet had thought they spoke in a religious sense; he hadn't realized they meant the infidels were truly demons. But that was most assuredly the ugliest djinn he'd ever heard of standing in the cupola of the fighting machine. Its skin, where he could see it, was a jaundice yellow. Its eyes were slanted and its teeth pointed in its sharply convex face. When it saw him, the demon's eyes grew wide and its mouth curved in a scimitar smile.

Hetman Mohammet wailed out prayers to Allah, and bent over his donkey's neck to make a smaller target when he saw the demon point what must be a weapon at him. He pointlessly kicked his beast to induce greater speed; the donkey was already at its fastest gallop.

Far too slow. A greenish fluid shot out of the nozzle of the demon's weapon and splashed on both rider and steed...

It took mere moments for the eight fighting vehicles that converged on Almedina to reduce all of its structures to cinders and charred briquettes.

Then they set out in pursuit of the fleeing villagers and their hiding places.

"I beg your pardon?" Ambassador Friendly Creadence said.

"YOU FAILED!"

Creadence thought Metropolitan Eleison looked and sounded like a prophet from the Old Testament, one condemning his followers for worshiping a golden calf or something.

"How—"

"The off-worlders came again and you have not yet told us who they are!"

Creadence had been a diplomat for entirely too long to let any reaction show on his face at the stunning news. In his peripheral vision he saw Harley Thorogood murmuring into his personal comm unit.

"Tell me when they came and where."

"Had you done as you agreed, instead of planting things to spy on our faithful, you would be telling me not only when and where, but who they were and whence they came!"

"Sirs, if I may speak?" Thorogood said as he slipped his comm unit into his pocket.

"Yessir, I can do that," Surveillance Tech Morley Christopher said into his headset as his fingers tapped a rapid staccato of commands on his keyboard. "I'll have it for you in a moment—if there's anything to have."

At the next workstation Elizabeth Rice was entering the same string of commands. Locate: sonic boom. Locate: unscheduled aircraft. Locate: explosions. Locate: fires larger than cooking.

Locate:screams other than children at play.

"Blessed Mothers," Rice whispered as the flick-flick-flick on her main monitor resolved into an unidentified orbit-to-surface shuttle on what looked like a crash-landing glide path.

Christopher was silent save for the heavy breathing coming from his gaping mouth. He hit the rapid forward to speed the action on his main monitor.

The shuttle didn't crash land. It fired braking rockets and made a safe touchdown. Four armored vehicles rushed out of it and sped toward what a scrolling legend identified as the village of Almedina. A second shuttle landed near the first and spewed out four more vehicles which sped after the first quartet.

A third let out four that went elsewhere.

The picture jerked as Christopher gave the command to follow the groups of vehicles. The monitor focus changed to the outskirts of the village and showed eight vehicles burning everything to the ground.

Then it jerked to a different view, this time of wilds the legend identified as within a kilometer and a half of the village. The vehicles started killing people in a manner neither Christopher nor Rice had ever heard of.

Christopher found his voice again. "Sir," he said, his voice strained, "it's a place called Almedina. Some kind of fighting vehicles came off shuttles and attacked ...Yessir, that's right, orbit-to-surface shuttles."

His fingers worked the keyboard again. "I've got the computer doing a search now to identify the shuttles and vehicles." A new window opened on his monitor. Automatically, he expanded the window to take up the entire screen; he'd already seen enough of the carnage to give him nightmares.

The window gave its search results. Shuttle: unidentified. Armored vehicles: unidentified.

"Sir, the computer doesn't recognize them. ...Right. As soon as we have more I'll notify you."

He glanced at Rice. She was still watching the Visuals on her monitor. Then she jumped. He heard her exclaim:

"That's impossible!" Her fingers hit Playback so she could see it again.

"Metropolitan," Thorogood said soothingly, "our technicians are working at this very moment to identify those who attacked Almedina. I am fully confident we will have their identity shortly, when we do, we will notify you."

It took a few more minutes, but Metropolitan Eleison finally left with his entourage, only slightly less angry than he had been when he arrived.

Thorogood swiveled his chair to face Creadence. "Shuttles, unidentified manufacture or place of origin, three of them," he said soberly. "Each carried four unidentified armored fighting vehicles. The AFVs went into the village of Almedina and destroyed it. Then they went hunting for the people who fled before they arrived. It seems they found most of the people and killed them. Maybe all of them."

"My God," Creadence murmured.

"I doubt any god," Thorogood looked at the door through which the religious delegation had just departed, "had anything to do with it." He stood. "I think we need to look at the pictures."

Creadence agreed. They went to look at the pictures.

"Can't you show them before the sonic boom?" Creadence asked.

"I'm sorry, sir," Rice said. "When we planted our devices, we really didn't think anything would come from above, so we didn't set anything to watch the sky."

"The only reason we have the visuals of the shuttles on approach," Christopher added, "is some cameras were set to turn to and focus on the sources of loud, unexpected noises."

"At that," Rice picked up, "there's a good fifteen or twenty second gap between when the shuttles broke the sound barrier and when our cameras picked them up."

"Mostly because of the length of time it took for the sound to reach the receptors," Christopher added.

He had to try to salvage something from what might well turn into a debacle. Who'd have thought they actually needed to watch the sky? Nobody except the nuts who ran that asylum had believed they were being hit by someone from off-world.

"All right, let it run. Show me what happened when they touched down." Creadence let the visuals run while the shuttles off-loaded their AFVs, all still unidentified, even though he had them run through the computers on whatever navy starship that was in orbit on some routine patrol, or whatever it was navy starships occasionally did that brought them into Kingdom's planetary space. He didn't have the visuals pause until one showed a good image of an AFV commander.

"Stop there. Focus on the vehicle commander and enlarge, then let me see some movement."

Creadence did, and swallowed at the image on his monitor. He stared at it for a long moment. He'd seen a few genetically engineered modifications to the basic human, made to suit the needs of a few worlds, but he'd never seen—or heard of—modifications that extreme. If he hadn't known humanity was alone, he'd have sworn the AFV commander was an alien. Why, that man even seemed to have nictating membranes on his eyes!

"Continue," he said.

He didn't speak again until the visuals showed vehicle commanders spraying people with some kind of greenish fluid from a hose attached to tanks mounted on their backs. Then it was again focus, enlarge, show movement. He turned to Thorogood.

"Have you ever heard of a weapon like that?"

Thorogood, looking somewhat greenish himself, simply shook his head.

Then it was forward again until the point where Rice had exclaimed, "That's impossible!"

"What happened?" Creadence demanded. "Why'd the visual cut off then?"

"It didn't," Rice said. She pointed with a shaky finger at a dot on the screen. She focused on it and enlarged. It was a flying scavenger gliding on thermals, clearly in motion. The picture hadn't stopped.

"Where'd the shuttle go?"

"Sir, I've run that sequence several times. I have no idea."

"Run it through again," Thorogood said. "Stop it at the instant the shuttle vanishes." She did.

She did.

Thorogood studied the frozen frame for a long moment The sky seemed to ripple a bit into different shades of blue, violet, and green, some of them not quite possible.

"I've never seen—" He stopped and snorted. "Hell, nobody's ever seen anything shift into Beamspace in an atmosphere. But I read a blue-sky paper on it once. The author hypothesized it would look something like that."

"But you can't shift into Beamspace in an atmosphere. Or deep in a gravity well."

"And a shuttle can't vanish into thin air either. But we just saw one do exactly that. Do you have a better explanation for what we just watched?"

Creadence didn't have a better idea, but he did have a disquieting thought.

"Do we have infrared images of any of the raiders?" he asked.

Christopher and Rice both tapped commands. An infrared view of two of the AFVs pursuing villagers popped up on their main monitors. The four studied the images, then read the scrolling legend. There was nothing unusual in the infrared about the AFVs. The pursued villagers had slightly elevated temperatures, as was to be expected under the circumstances. The two AFV commanders had body temperatures not far above the ambient air temperature.

Thorogood and his boss exchanged haunted glances. Christopher and Rice looked at them and shivered.

"I don't give a damn about the treaty," Creadence croaked. "Full planetary surveillance as of now. I want to know where those shuttles are coming from."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

"Well, well, well, well," Noto Draya rumbled, his voice echoing hollowly off the dripping walls of the dungeon. It was very early in the morning, so the Coliseum was empty except for the prisoners and their guards.

On the flight from Placetas the three Marines had been thrown together with Mr. Prost, who, like everyone else who'd had more than just casual contact with them, had been arrested on suspicion and tortured. Now they all lay chained to the walls, awaiting more torture and then death. During the flight, guards had taken turns beating them with their fists and clubs, not enough to injure them permanently, just to pass the time, Ferris had ordered his men to go easy on the captives because he had special plans for them.

Homs Ferris, his bulk rolling along behind Draya's, put a hand to his mouth and yawned. "Too damned early for me, Noto. Big day today, so let's have our fun and get some rest before the games." It was three A.M. Wednesday.

It was Wednesday, and a huge gladiatorial contest was scheduled to begin at noon. It would be kicked off by the slaughter of the four men in chains.

"I rather like the effect of these torches," Ferris said.

"We only use them when the tourists are let in here before the games," Sal Richter, counselor to the Ferris Family, responded. The actors who played the roles of gladiators and prisoners scheduled for sacrifice in the arena were mustered in that cavernous prison before the start of the games so the tourists could gape at them. "You ought to visit us more often."

"He's right, Homs," Draya wheezed, "you ain't made it down here in a while. You ought to take a week off, especially this time of the year, when the weather's so bad up there, and spend it with us."

"We've had business to take care of recently," Johnny Sticks replied for his boss. Avoiding the puddles, he walked carefully through the dirty straw covering the stone floor. Juanita clung to his arm, her eyes glittering with anticipation.

A guard clanked open the iron gate to the cells and the party stepped through.

"Well, if it ain't the goddamn Tons of Fun!" Claypoole croaked. His face was swollen and a tooth had been pried loose in the front of his mouth as punishment for just such wisecracks. One of Sticks's goons had done it with a knife. The gap was still bleeding.

In a corner two huge men, stripped to the waist, stood next to an array of torture instruments.

"I see what you mean about this one, Johnny," Ferris said. "He does have a smart mouth. Noto, which one shall we start on?"

Draya put his hand on his chin and thought for a moment. "The librarian. I hate books. Put that scrawny old fart into the boot for a while." The "boot" was an iron shoe that could be filled with boiling water or hot coals while it was fastened to a person's foot. "Uh-uh, just one foot, boys," Draya cautioned the guards. "He's got to be able to do some maneuvering later this morning, when we put him in the arena." Draya's body rumbled with laughter.

Two guards unchained Prost and dragged him to the torturers.

"Mr. Ferris," he shouted, "this is unfair! I had nothing to do with these spies! Please, sir, please!"